press:
A December Trifecta at
Aucocisco Galleries:
Scott Davis, Ken Greenleaf, Richard Van Buren
PORTLAND, MAINE—Three artists. Three distinct visions. Three far-reaching
careers. Aucocisco Galleries is proud to announce a unique triple-bill
featuring the work of Scott Davis, Ken Greenleaf, and Richard Van Buren.
This combination of artists—each over sixty years old and each working in
Maine—is nothing less than a visual trifecta.
Raised in Kansas and educated in California, Scott Davis began his art
career in earnest in 1970s New York City as part of the Whitney Museum
Studio Program. Today, Davis’s work is housed in museum collections across
the country, including the Guggenheim Museum (New York), Cincinnati Art
Museum (Ohio) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla
(California).
Davis describes his spare, ethereal paintings as a visual combination of
Shaker furniture and Haiku poetry—they give viewers “the sense that there
is a real reason for their presence and that there is always an
undercurrent of narrative.”
“I have come to believe,” says Davis, “that my work incorporates the past,
the present, and the continuation of time—a sense of looking towards the
future.”
A resident of Maine since 1993, Davis’s work is already housed in the
collections of the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and
Colby College.
Artist Ken Greenleaf’s work resides in several of the same local
institutions as Davis’s, as well as nationally in museums such as the
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Ulrich Museum of Art (Kansas),
and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas).
Here in Maine, Greenleaf’s name has been synonymous with art for decades.
His critical writings about art have long appeared in the Maine Sunday
Telegram and Portland Phoenix. As an artist, Greenleaf is the veteran of
over twenty solo exhibitions, including several shows at New York City’s
renowned Tibor de Nagy Gallery. His work has been reviewed in publications
such as the New York Times, Artforum, and ArtNews.
Greenleaf’s recent series of black-and-white drawings and paintings show a
great economy of line honed by his decades of experience. “I seek an art
that is without rhetoric, fiction, or illusion,” says the artist. “We can
apprehend shape, scale, and line in ways that are resonant, and quite
real.”
Like his colleagues, Davis and Greenleaf, Richard Van Buren has a long and
storied connection to the New York City art world—not long after his
relocation there in the mid-1960s, Van Buren was included in the seminal
exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966. He went on to
exhibit with the Bykert Gallery and the Paula Cooper Gallery.
Today, Van Buren is a denizen of Perry, Maine. His work can be found in
some of the country’s finest museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art
(New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Massachusetts), and The National
Gallery (Washington, DC).
Known for creating brilliantly colored sculpture—which the New York Times
has described as having “a kind of monstrous opulence”—Van Buren will be
displaying two suites of black and white drawings at Aucocisco. In his
“Fundy Series,” Van Buren has drawn inspiration from the light, movement,
color, form, sound, and smell of Passamaquoddy Bay. The artist’s
“Headhunter” series examines what he calls humanity’s constant search “for
the re-affirmation of the human presence.”
Individually, Davis, Greenleaf, and Van Buren each create exceptional art
that bears the considered touch of their extensive and broad experiences.
Shown together, in a single gallery, the impact of their art will be
magnified. This triple-bill marks an exceptional finale to Aucocisco’s
2009 season.
Scott Davis, Ken Greenleaf, Richard Van Buren
First Friday Art Walk Reception: Friday, December 4, 5:00 – 8:00 PM
Showing: December 4 - 26, 2009
FMI and images please contact:
Aucocisco Galleries
Andres A. Verzosa
Owner/Director
Physical: 89 Exchange Street
Portland, ME 04101
Mail: P.O. Box 7897
Portland, Maine 04112
Phone: 207.775.2222
Email: director@aucocisco.com
Website: www.aucocisco.com <http://www.aucocisco.com/>
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00am to 6:00pm, and by appointment.
CHARCOAL DRAWINGS BY KEN
GREENLEAF AT GOLD/SMITH GALLERY
by John Vander
Ken
Greenleaf has long been on the Maine art scene, as a sculptor and a
critic/ commentator, but it has been close to a decade since he has shown
a new body of work to the public. Beginning August 6th and continuing
through September 8th Gold/Smith Gallery in Boothbay Harbor will be
proudly featuring a suite of 21 charcoal drawings created by Greenleaf
over the past year.
Greenleaf is
best known as a sculptor, particularly for his constructions in wood and
steel, although he has used other materials as well. The first sculptures
I saw of Ken Greenleaf’s, more than thirty years ago, were table like
constructions in marble and steel. Sculpture using combinations of
materials often seem to me unsuccessful, but Greenleaf has always had an
acute sense of both poetic and plastic qualities of materials and uses
them with great skill and sensitivity. In fact, those sculptures stuck in
my mind until I had the pleasure of meeting Greenleaf fifteen years later.
In this new
body of work in his sensibility towards his material is extremely evident.
He has chosen the whitest of white papers and the blackest charcoal he
could find. These are small drawings with both open and closed forms in
heavy, very black bar-like lines. This seemingly simple, austere means
produces a remarkable richness of effect. The bars can be seen as a
weighty substance or tracks plowed into the white of the paper like trails
left by heavy equipment in a snowy field.
Ken
Greenleaf is a Maine native and his work has always evoked, to me, the
light industry and crafts I think of as traditional to the Maine coast:
boatyards, lumber mills, small quarries, piers, docks, bridges, ladders,
hoists of the working waterfront, a spirit of fine craft, rough and ready
utilities with Yankee make-do ingenuity. His lines lumber, plow skid,
hesitate and swerve to describe open or closed forms that invite being
seen as three dimensional. After a bit of looking they thwart that
reading. Bars overshoot intersections with some ferocity, flipping a three
dimensional form back to a graphic sign.
Greenleaf
has an apparent allergy to the right angle. This gives his designs
enormous internal tension. Weight against interior weight holds the closed
forms together. More open designs have a teetering, precarious balance.
For all the starkness of the black and white, the rough edges of the bars
give the drawings grit , warmth and intimacy. Their play with two and
three dimensions have wit and mystery. They’re like familiar furniture
encountered from a strange perspective and an eschewed point of view.
Ken
Greenleaf has been exhibiting his work since 1972 in Maine, New York City,
Houston and Chicago. He is represented in major public and private
collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Lannan
Foundation, The Portland Museum, and The Farnsworth. He was an art critic
for The Portland Sunday Telegram and the Maine Times and is currently an
art critic and commentator for the Portland Phoenix.
The
Gold/Smith Gallery will be having a reception for Ken Greenleaf at the
gallery, Saturday, August 8th from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. The Public is
cordially invited to come and meet Greenleaf and enjoy is new drawings.
The gallery is located at 41 Commercial Street, Boothbay Harbor, next to
the Ebb Tide Restaurant. For more information the gallery can be reached
at 207-633-6252.
October 2009 |
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